Metamorphosis of making maple sweets

Saturday

Mar 16, 2013 at 6:00 AMMar 17, 2013 at 8:48 AM

The sweet smell of success is billowing from sugarhouses across the state. As long as the weather holds, this annual rite of early spring, which American Indians shared centuries ago with their new European neighbors, will continue for a few weeks to come.

By Bradford L. Miner CORRESPONDENT

The sweet smell of success is billowing from sugarhouses across the state.

As long as the weather holds, this annual rite of early spring, which American Indians shared centuries ago with their new European neighbors, will continue for a few weeks to come.

The plastic pipeline delivering hundreds of gallons of sap to large galvanized tanks on a country roadside is a far cry from the simple hatchet cut at the base of a sugar maple that dripped into a basket made from bark.

And while woodland tribes throughout New England once used super-heated rocks in large troughs gouged from tree trunks to transform sap into maple sugar, now reverse osmosis and stainless steel evaporators do the same work, but much faster .

Throughout the month, Maple Days at Old Sturbridge Village give weekend visitors a chance to tap a maple using methods common to rural families in the early 19th century.

A short distance away, sugarhouses produce syrup using the latest technology.

The common denominator, then as now, is the sugar maple. It produces a slightly sweet sap, 40 to 50 gallons of which will make a single gallon of syrup.

The other essential for maple producers is favorable weather. While an unusually warm March a year ago dramatically shortened maple season in New England, conditions this year are earning two thumbs up from maple producers.

It's not uncommon to see the covered tin buckets or blue plastic tubing just about anywhere there is a concentration of sugar maples, but among the state's 200 maple producers, a handful have a unique setup, their taps within the boundaries of the Quabbin Reservation.

Maple syrup is not a major crop because there are relatively few stands of sugar maple, coupled with weather limitations, according to the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association.

Of the 200 association members, some make fewer than a hundred gallons of syrup annually; commercial producers make upward of 2,000 gallons.

The state's annual production averages 50,000 gallons. In comparison, Vermont last year produced 750,000 gallons despite the shortened season.

Herm Eck, chief forester for the Quabbin and Ware River watersheds, said eight Quabbin lots this year have a total of 4,810 taps on 2,500 sugar maples.

Mr. Eck estimated the taps should produce 1,200 gallon of syrup.

The permits for tapping are put out to bid every three years. The minimum bid accepted by the Department of Conservation and Recreation is 30 cents per tap.

The agency this year earned $1,457.40 from the permits.

Peter Church, DCR's director of forest stewardship, said the department is exploring the possibility of issuing maple-tapping permits for its other properties.

“We met a year ago with the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association, but no decisions were made at the time because DCR had yet to finalize the reserve, parkland and woodland designations for its properties,” Mr. Church said.

Under those designations, tapping would be permitted at woodland forests and parks, primarily in Central and Western Massachusetts, where sugar maples are more plentiful.

“We're already well into this maple season, so it's possible we could have something in place for next year, based on the success of the Quabbin program,” he said.

For Gary Skarza of Cooleyville Road, New Salem, the decision to bid on Quabbin Reservation taps was easy.

Mr. Skarza's Cooleyville Farm and its sugarhouse, which he cut and milled from white pines on his property, is a stone's throw from the gated entrance to Prescott Peninsula.

“I'm surrounded on three sides by Quabbin, and it's always been a part of my life. Of the 219 taps I have out this year, I'd say about 80 percent are on Quabbin land,” he said.

While Grade A syrup is the desired outcome for the majority of maple producers today, that was not the case for Native Americans, who were the first to observe maple trees dripping sap from wounds during the early spring, when sap began rising from the roots.

Maple syrup, when not refrigerated, has a limited shelf life before it develops mold on the surface. For this reason, New England tribes, and those settlers who followed and adopted the practice, kept the heat beneath the sap until it crystallized into maple sugar, which could be kept from one year to the next.

Justin Kennick, Maple Days interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, explained that virtually all decisions made by a rural family in the early 1800s were based on cost.

“A family could buy buckets made by the local cooper at 25 cents apiece, but if they had a hundred or more taps, it didn't make sense to spend that kind of money on something they would use for a few weeks once a year. Instead they would use the cheapest wood at their disposal, pine, which would be hollowed out by one of the young boys in the family, to make a trough to collect sap,” he said.

A T auger was used to penetrate the bark of the tree, and a tap or spile made from a hollowed-out sumac twig would direct the sap from tree to trough, he said.

Margaret Bruchac, who portrays Molly Geet, an Indian medicine specialist, at special events at Old Sturbridge Village throughout the year said Indians would concentrate maple sap before evaporating it with hot rocks by skimming the ice from sap baskets first thing each morning.

“The alternate cycle of freezing overnight and warming during the day was ideal condition for the sap to flow,” she said.

“The ice was all water, so after a couple of days of freezing and skimming, the sugar content of the remaining sap had increased,” Ms. Bruchac explained.

Indians did not use salt, but maple sugar was their basic seasoning year-round for meat, grains, fish, vegetables and dried berries. It was also offered to guests as a show of respect.

Most New England families in the early 19th century produced their own maple sugar if they had sugar maples on their property, or bartered with neighbors if they did not.

Mr. Kennick said it was considered the common sugar for household use, but cane sugar, bought from the store, was preferred when entertaining guests. The exception, he said, were the abolitionists, who disdained white sugar because it was produced with slave labor.